Why more black parents are homeschooling their children

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Marvell Robinson was in kindergarten when a classmate poured an anthill on him at the playground. After that, the gibes became sharper: “Why are you that color?” one boy taunted at the swing set, leaving Marvell scared and speechless. The slow build of racial bullying would push his mother, Vanessa Robinson, to pull him from public school in favor of homeschooling.

Marvell is one of an estimated 220,000 African-American children currently being homeschooled, according to the National Home Education Research Institute. Black families have become one of the fastest-growing demographics in homeschooling, with black students making up an estimated 10 percent of the homeschooling population. They make up 16 percent of public school students, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

And while white homeschooling families traditionally cite religious or moral disagreements with public schools in their decision to homeschool, studies indicate black families are more likely to cite the culture of low expectations for black students or dissatisfaction with how their children—especially boys—are treated in schools.

Marvell Robinson plays outside of the San Diego Natural History Museum after an educational field trip. Credit: Vanessa Robinson

Marvell, now 7 and in the second grade, was the only black student in both his kindergarten and first-grade classes, and one of only a few black students in his San Diego elementary school, according to his mother. And Robinson said Marvell’s Asperger syndrome—a high-functioning form of autism that makes social interaction difficult—only added to the curiosity and cruelty with which his fellow classmates approached him. She was concerned the school wasn’t doing enough about it. “I just thought maybe I could do a better job myself,” she said.

“They said, ‘kids will be kids,’ and the only solution was for Marvell to be monitored—like he had done something wrong,” she said. “In the end, I don’t think that anyone should have to monitor my kid” because of other kids’ behavior.

Robinson allowed Marvell to finish first grade there, and he began second grade in September as a homeschooled student. Robinson adjusted her nursing schedule to include 12-hour shifts on the weekends so she could take on educating Marvell during the week. Her husband, a sous chef at a restaurant in downtown San Diego, continues to work full time and participates in lessons when he can. While her primary motivation was giving Marvell individualized attention, she was unable to separate her worries about racial bullying from the decision.

“If he hadn’t been bullied I would have really looked into transferring schools, or going back to where I grew up in Kansas,” she said. “At least in Kansas it was more racially diverse. I assumed that’s how the schools would be in San Diego, but I was wrong.”

Joyce Burges at National Black Home Educators has watched her membership grow “exponentially” in the 15 years since it was founded, a trend also reflected in Marvell’s home state of California. While Burges’s national conferences in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, used to attract only around 50 people, they now attract upwards of 400, she said—a noteworthy number for the first organization for black homeschoolers in a sea of predominantly white organizations.

“Whenever there are mentions of African-American homeschoolers, it’s assumed that we homeschool for the same reasons as European-American homeschoolers, but this isn’t really the case.”

Marie-Josée Cérol—known professionally as Ama Mazama—a faculty member in the department of African American Studies at Temple University in Philadelphia. Mazama began homeschooling her three children 12 years ago and realized quickly that there was little research on black homeschoolers.

“Whenever there are mentions of African-American homeschoolers, it’s assumed that we homeschool for the same reasons as European-American homeschoolers, but this isn’t really the case,” she said. “Because of the unique circumstances of black people in this country, there is really a new story to be told.”

In a 2012 report published in the Journal of Black Studies, she surveyed black homeschooling families from around the country and found most chose to educate their children at home, at least in part, to avoid school-related racism. Mazama calls this rationale “racial protectionism” and said it is a response to the inability of schools to meet the needs of black students.

“We have all heard that the American education system is not the best and is falling behind in terms of international standards,” she said. “But this is compounded for black children, who are treated as though they are not as intelligent and cannot perform as well, and therefore the standards for them should be lower.”

Mazama said schools also rob black children of the opportunity to learn about their own culture because of a “Euro-centric” world-history curriculum.

“Typically, the curriculum begins African-American history with slavery and ends it with the Civil Rights Movement,” she said. “You have to listen to yourself simply being talked about as a descendent of slaves, which is not empowering. There is more to African history than that.”

Mazama’s studies show that black parents who choose to homeschool often teach a comprehensive view of African history by incorporating more detailed descriptions of ancient African civilizations and accounts of successful African people throughout history. This allows children to “build their sense of racial pride and self esteem,” she said.

In her own studies, Cheryl Fields-Smith, an associate professor in the department of Educational Theory and Practice at the University of Georgia, has found similar motivations among black homeschoolers.

“The schools want little black boys to behave like little white girls, and that’s just never going to happen. They are different,” she said. “I think black families who are in a position to homeschool can use homeschooling to avoid the issues of their children being labeled ‘trouble makers’ and the suggestion that their children need special-education services because they learn and behave differently.”

What it means to be “in a position to homeschool” has long been a question in the homeschooling community. According to Mazama, regardless of race, homeschooling families tend to be wealthier and better educated because they must have the economic ability to have one parent stay home full time. Home education, she added, is “not a middle-class phenomenon.” Though, both she and Fields-Smtih say this is beginning to change. Mazama cites the ability for families to apply for subsidies in order to continue receiving the nutritional opportunities public schools typically provide, and public programs that allow students to enroll in low-cost or sports and physical activities to replace physical education, as reasons why families are seeing homeschooling as an option.

“The schools want little black boys to behave like little white girls, and that’s just never going to happen. They are different.”

In fact, Fields-Smith is in the process of writing a book on black, single homeschooling mothers because she sees “more and more families of less means” making the decision to sacrifice traditional career paths so that they can pull their children from school.

Rhonda McKnight would be an archetypical candidate for Fields-Smith’s book. As a single mother, she works about 45 hours per week as a contractor for the state of Georgia – often at odd hours and during the weekend – so she can homeschool her 8-year-old son, Micah.

While a common criticism of homeschooling is a potential lack of socialization for children, Mazama said the growing number of homeschooling groups solves this problem. McKnight took advantage of this by joining a homeschooling collective that, in addition to providing Micah time with other children, also helps her manage her workload. The group gathers on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays to do extracurricular events and hands-on learning activities that can’t easily be done in the home, giving McKnight some time to herself—and some time to work.

Micah, who like Marvell is autistic, didn’t learn well in a classroom with 25 students, and McKnight felt as though his teacher was misinterpreting symptoms of his disability as behavioral problems and accusing him of “behavior that was not typical to him.”

“I don’t know how racially motivated it was at the time,” she said. “But even black teachers are taught certain things they are not even aware of. Our culture tends towards labeling our boys.”

The poor education left Micah significantly behind in several subjects, which now requires his mother to pack as much into his schedule as possible.

“He doesn’t really get a day off—not right now, because he’s just behind. I feel like he doesn’t really have time to relax,” she said, explaining she wasn’t aware just how behind he was until she started to homeschool him. Most devastating, she said, was when she realized her son was reading well below his expected third-grade level.

“I felt like I had totally failed him, and the school had totally failed him, and the only thing I could do was work with him one-on-one to get him caught up.”

To get Micah back on track, McKnight has employed a original mix of purchased homeschool lesson plans and lessons she’s written herself on top of what Micah learns at the collective. When Micah is home, McKnight said the days are “totally dedicated to him.”

They work for at least an hour on each of the core subjects, studying within the grade level that best suits him in each area. On days he returns from the collective, McKnight reads with him for two or three hours with the goal of getting him to a third-grade level by the end of the year. Lessons even continue on Saturdays and Sundays. He’s at his father’s place every other weekend, where he continues his reading schedule, and on the weekends that he’s home McKnight takes him on educational field trips — Atlanta’s many museums are frequent destinations.

It’s this ability to shape everyday activities and lessons to meet the personal needs of each child that Fields-Smith finds so promising about homeschooling—especially for black families.

An estimated 220,000 African-American children are currently being homeschooled, according to the National Home Education Research Institute.

“There is no one way to homeschool,” she said, noting all of the families that spoke to her in her study were “catering to their children and customizing their education for them” instead of using a single homeschooling curriculum wholesale.

But Mazama and Fields-Smith acknowledge that homeschooling is controversial, particularly in the black community.

“For African-Americans there is a sense of betrayal when you leave public schools in particular,” Mazama said. “Because the struggle to get into those schools was so harsh and so long, there is this sense of loyalty to the public schools. People say, ‘We fought to get into these schools, and now you are just going to leave?’”

For Paula Penn-Nabrit, who homeschooled her children in the 1990s, this struggle hits very close to home. Her husband’s uncle, James Nabrit, argued Brown v. Board of Education in front of the Supreme Court alongside Thurgood Marshall and later served as the president of Howard University. When she made the decision to pull her three sons from public school, it angered many of her black friends.

“A lot of people felt that because my family was intimately involved in the effort to integrate schools, that for me to pull my children out of schools was a betrayal of all that work,” she said. “But it really wasn’t. The case had nothing to do with what I, as a parent, decide I want for my child. That decision meant the state can’t decide to give me less than, but I can decide I want more than.”

In 2003, Penn-Nabrit published the book Morning by Morning: How We Home-Schooled Our African-American Sons to the Ivy League in an effort to help others repeat her successes with homeschooling. Her older twin sons, Damon and Charles, both attended Princeton, and her youngest son, Evan, went to Amherst College and then to the University of Pennsylvania.*

Penn-Nabrit said her book received “a lot of open hostility”—with several people accusing her of racism—because it detailed accounts of the discrimination her sons allegedly faced in public school and emphasized an Afrocentric approach to education.

Upon deciding to homeschool their sons, Penn-Nabrit and her husband, who both of have degrees in the humanities, elected to teach them the subject areas they knew well. For the remaining science and math courses, however, they hired black, mostly male, graduate students from the Ohio State University to take over—in large part so that the boys had exposure to successful people who looked like them.**

According to the Department of Education, less than 2 percent of current classroom teachers are African-American males. This was particularly troubling for Penn-Nabritt, whose children never had a black man as a teacher.

“Most black people go to school and never have a teacher that looks like them, and this is particularly true for black boys,” she said. This same logic, she noted, led to the creation of single-sex schools—a particularly apt comparison for Penn-Nabrit, who attended Wellesley. “If women benefit from having a period of isolation from the larger group, that could be applicable to black boys as well.”

Mazama said that rooting children in their heritage in this way allows them to do better emotionally and socially.

“If anything, homeschooled black children would be much stronger because they would not have been devastated at an early age by racism,” she said, noting that the absence of these early destructive experiences combined with a curriculum that builds up African heritage allows children to recognize and deal with racism, “not by denying it, but by confronting it because they are comfortable with who they are.

“That’s the way I teach my own children,” she said. “I have seen this work.”

Vanessa Robinson in San Diego has also seen it work. She has now been homeschooling Marvell for five months, and said he is better adjusted and has moved farther along academically than he had in public school.

“He’s a completely different person,” she said, reporting that his confidence is higher compared to where it was in public school, allowing him to make friends in his neighborhood and learn more quickly. Robinson bought a set of lesson plans with a suggested timeline, but Marvell moves so quickly now that she has to add lessons together from several curricula just to keep up. And when he finds something he loves, she lets him dive deep.

“Right now, Marvell says he wants to work for NASA, so we’re really focusing on getting in depth into science and space,” she said. His new interest is a thrilling prospect for Robinson, a registered nurse with a background in science.

“I just want my son to be a free thinker and to question everything,” she said. “I wish that when I was growing up, I could have done that.”

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news website focused on inequality and innovation in education.

*Correction: This story has been updated with correct information about the designations with which Penn-Nabrit’s sons graduated. Only one graduated with honors from Princeton.

**Correction: This story has been updated with correct information about the degrees earned by Penn-Nabrit and her husband. Only Penn-Nabrit has an advanced degree. It has also been changed to correct the university from which they hired tutors: Ohio State University.

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